RED HOOK EDITIONS – A publishing community

La Batea: Impressions of Gold in Colombia

by Stephen and Elizabeth Ferry

A brother- and-sister team, Stephen and Elizabeth Ferry have produced La Batea: Impressions of Gold in Colombia, La Batea explores gold's double effects - situations of violence, contamination, and exploitation, but also of devotion, craftsmanship, and anchored communities. By taking this rounded approach, La Batea aims to contribute to the global debate over the social, political and environmental impacts of gold mining.

The title La Batea comes from the Spanish word for the wooden pan used by artisanal miners to separate gold from the surrounding earth and rock. The technique of working with a batea entails close engagement with the material of gold itself, something we aim to replicate in our photographs, writings, and in the book's design.

The graininess of Stephen’s film, along with the material and construction of the book, work to create a marked sense of texture. A spot of real gold leaf on the cover further materializes the subject matter. With this emphasis on tactile experience, La Batea bends the traditional genres of documentary photography and anthropological writing.

Format: Lay-flat, section-sewn
Number of Books: 1,000
Cover Price: $39.00 USD
Dimensions: 5.5 x 9.5 x 1.5
Publication Date: Available December 1, 2016

La Batea on kickstarter Article on New York Times About Stephen About Elizabeth

Diagram of the Heart

by Glenna Gordon

There’s a small but vibrant cottage industry of Muslim women writing romance novels, littattafan soyayya, in Northern Nigeria, a region best known for the acts of terrorist group Boko Haram. The writers face off with Islamic censors, and they sell their books in markets that are often the same ones targeted by Boko Haram suicide bombers.

The books are about love and marriage. Sometimes subversive and sometimes submissive, the plot lines often feature a poor girl marrying a rich man, and other fantasies of a better life.

Guided by the themes of the novels, Diagram of the Heart explores romance, tradition, love and loss in the lives of women in Northern Nigeria.

Order Diagram of the Heart, a Red Hook Editions monograph, for $35.

Dimensions: 6" x 8" x .5"
Pages: 140, with 75 photographs
Designer: Bonnie Briant

We All We Got

by Carlos Javier Ortiz

We All We Got explores the consequences and devastation of youth violence in contemporary America from 2006 to 2013, through a mix of powerful photographs, incisive essays and moving letters from diverse individuals affected by this perennial scourge.

Carlos Javier Ortiz’s work provides an avenue for knowing these children and their families. This work is not the end of the conversation about youth violence and society’s complicity in it, but rather the beginning. The terror in the eyes of grieving children and inconsolable mothers only allows the viewer to begin to understand the toll that this reality takes on the children who live it.

The stories take place in Chicago and Philadelphia. By repeatedly returning to the same neighborhoods over the course of eight years, Ortiz shows the plight of the communities with which he has built a deep connection. You see abandoned buildings, memorials for victims, segregation, graffiti, juvenile incarceration and other constant reminders of the outcomes of violence on young people and their surroundings.

But through all the heartbreak, you also see the incredible resilience of the individuals left behind. And where there is terror, there is also a glimpse of the innocence that remains and a tiny glimmer of hope.

Bio: Carlos Javier Ortiz works with photography, film, and text. As a visual artist, he specializes in long-term documentaries that focus on urban life, gun violence, race, poverty and marginalized communities. Ortiz collaborates with his subjects by asking them to share their personal narratives and testimonials. His work confronts human suffering while simultaneously illuminating compassion and optimism.

Contributors: Forward by: Alex Kotlowitz, Essays by Tonya Burch, Maria Ramirez, Coree Parks, Frederick Dennis, Elijah Anderson Ph.D , Luke Anderson

Format: Lay-flat, section-sewn
Number of Books: 1,000
Limited Special Edition: 150 special edition books, cloth on slipcase, with posters.
Cover Price: $49.00 USD
Dimensions: 7.5 x 9.5 x 1
Publication Date: Available September 1, 2014

About Carlos

Disco Night Sept. 11

by Peter van Agtmael

Disco Night Sept. 11 is a chronicle of America's wars from 2006-2013. The photographs shift back and forth from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the USA, unsparingly capturing the violent, ceaseless cost, but also the mystery and the madness, the beauty and absurdity at the core of each conflict. The narrative is complemented by nineteen gatefolds which elaborate on places and individuals.

Photographs are fragments, sometimes only loosely tied to important experiences. An extensive text records some of the missing pieces. The stories that precede and follow the moment of the photograph, conversations with soldiers, anonymous graffiti that's part confession, part boast.

Disco Night Sept. 11 is an expansive yet intimate account of this defining era of history.

Dimensions: 8.5" x 10.5" | Pages: 276 including 19 Gatefolds | Photographs: 188 | Designer: Yolanda Cuomo Design

Available April 2014, Unsigned
Signed books are available at magnum photos

From the backlist

The Americans List

By the Glow of the Juke Box

Conceived and compiled by Jason Eskenazi

While working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Eskenazi began to ask photographers he knew visiting the Looking In exhibition about Robert Frank’s The Americans what their favorite image was and why. In the two years since he quit, as he himself got back out on the road again to shoot, he complied 276 photographers’ answers in a unique book destined to become a classic in photography education.

Includes contributions from Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz, Jeffrey Ladd, Robert Frank, Martin Parr, Philip Perkis, David Alan Harvey, Bill Burke, Josef Koudelka, John Gossage, Juliana Beasley, Sara Terry, Mark Steinmetz, Vanessa Winship, Alec Soth and many more.

Buy at photoeye About Jason

Wonderland

A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith

Photos and Text by Jason Eskenazi

The story of Communism is the story of the twentieth century. For many, the Soviet Union existed, like their childhood, as a fairy tale where many of the realities of life were hidden from plain view. When the Berlin Wall finally fell, so too did the illusion of that utopia. Wonderland is a photographic exploration that portrays both the reality beneath the veneer of a utopian USSR and the affirmation of hope that should never be abandoned. And like all fairy tales try to teach us: the hard lessons of self-reliance.

Buy at jasoneskenazi.com About Jason

Dog Food

DOG FOOD is a photography newspaper born out of the Istanbul photo community that combines mostly archival material mixed with a dash of cynicism. The dog was the symbol of the cynics so we question our practices and have some creative fun doing it. ENJOY!

Hard copies available in New York at DASHWOOD Books and ICP bookstore or online at issuu.

It's free!

View at issuu View at lensblog

About Red Hook Editions

our mission statement

A community

We are a publishing community formed by photographers who believe in creating high-quality books, empowering artistic and editorial decisions to ourselves.

A new model

Red Hook Editions is a new model: photographers will take on many responsibilities, from funding to advertising to distribution, but will crucially retain control and ownership.

Empowering

Beyond DIY: New technology and social media have made it easier than ever before to bring personal projects to fruition. But what can never change is the emphasis on high standards of content and production. We will help join these goals together.

Meet us in Brooklyn

The Red Hook Editions community will meet several times a year in Brooklyn, with advisers and experts in relevant fields, to intensively workshop labors of love into finished form between the covers of beautiful books.

Photobook Publishers Network (PPN)

Photobook Publishers Network (PPN) brings together independent publishers of photo books with the goal of supporting documentary photographers and publishers of humanitarian photography.

Photobook Publishers Network works with publishers to address challenges and foster cooperation in the promotion and distribution of independently produced photo books.

BazanPhotos Publishing was created in 2006 by photograher Ernesto Bazan and many of his students and friends. The initial purpose was to self-publish the photographer’s Cuban trilogy. Bazan Cuba, Al Campo and Isla. Since 2015,BPP has began self-publishing the work by some of the very talented photographers who have studied under his guidance. With Animals by Willard Pate was self-published in 2015 and Hometown by Barbara Peacock was just released in 2016.

bazanphotospublishing.com

FotoEvidence was founded to support documentary photographers whose work focuses on social justice and human rights. Each year the FotoEvidence Book Award recognizes one photographer with the publication of their project in a hard copy book, as part of a series of FotoEvidence books dedicated to social justice.

www.fotoevidence.com

The Authors

Jason Eskenazi

The fall of the Berlin Wall led Eskenazi out of Queens into the larger world. After trips to Germany and Romania for their first democratic elections he traveled to Russia in 1991, just before the August coup that marked the end of the USSR, and has returned many times since culminating in a photography book project called Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, winner of Best Photography Book 2008 by Pictures of the Year International.

In 2004 he received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia to make a series of large format color portraits called Title Nation with a Russian colleague which will be published Fall 2010.

Jason Eskenazi has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1999; The Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, 1999, for his work in a Jewish Village in Azerbaijan; and The Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant, 1996. His work has appeared in many magazines including Time, Newsweek and The New York Times and Soros Foundation publications.

In 2004 -2005 Eskenazi organized a Kids with Cameras workshop in the old city of Jerusalem, teaching photography to Arab Muslims and Jewish children, which toured many U.S. cities.

For economic reasons as well as to obtain health insurance Eskenazi took a job as a Security Guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 2008 – Nov 2009. He created and co-edited a new independent magazine called SW!PE which showcased the artwork of museum guards, and received a lot of media attention. While guarding the Looking In exhibition at the museum, he also began the creation of the Americans List: By the Glow of the Jukebox, which recorded the choices and comments of over 250 photographers who were influenced by Robert Franks seminal work, The Americans.

Eskenazi quit the museum and used saved funds in order to continue photographing for his next project The Black Garden set in the geographical locations known to the ancient Greeks, investigating the east-west divide, while basing himself in Istanbul. He was also the International Curator/ Creative Director for the Bursa Photo Fest for its first 2 years.

He is also a co-founder and editor of DOG FOOD, a newspaper blending Cynic Philosophy and Photography.

Jason’s Website

Alan Chin

Alan was born and raised in New York City’s Chinatown. Since 1996, he has worked in China, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Central Asia. Domestically, Alan has followed the historic trail of the civil rights movement, documented the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and covered the 2008 presidential campaign. He is a contributing photographer to The New York Times, the Chinese magazine Modern Weekly, writer and photographer for BagNews, editor and photographer at Newsmotion, photographer at Facing Change: Documenting America (FCDA), and his work is in the collection of the Museum Of Modern Art.

Alan's first Red Hook Editions book, due to be completed in 2015, will document his ancestral region of Toishan in southern China.

Alan’s Website

Peter van Agtmael

Peter was born in Washington DC. He studied history at Yale, graduating with honors in 2003.

He has won the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer, the Lumix Freelens Award, as well as awards from World Press Photo, American Photography Annual, The Pulitzer Center, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and Photo District News.

Peter joined Magnum in 2008 and became a full member in 2013.

Peter’s Website

Carlos Javier Ortiz

Carlos Javier Ortiz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and raised in Chicago. As a visual artist, he works with photography, film and text and specializes in long-term documentaries that focus on urban life, gun violence, race, poverty and marginalized communities. Ortiz collaborates with his subjects by asking them to share their personal narratives and testimonials. His work confronts human suffering while simultaneously illuminating compassion and optimism.

Ortiz has received numerous accolades for his work, including the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Photography award for his series “Too Young to Die,” a multi-year, comprehensive examination of youth violence in the United States and Central America. He has also received grants from the Open Society Foundations, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the California Endowment National Health Journalism Fellowship, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award.

Ortiz’s photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and are displayed in the permanent collections of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y., the Library of Congress in Washington, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Carlos Javier Ortiz lives in Chicago and Oakland, Calif.

Carlos’ Website

Glenna Gordon

Glenna Gordon is a documentary photographer who has worked in Africa since 2006. She's been commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and many others. She was the recipient of a World Press Award in 2015, and her other awards include the LensCulture Grand Prize for Visual Storytelling, PX3 First Prize for Portraiture, and the PDN Annuals' Project Award. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the New School in New York.

Time's Lightbox described Glenna’s photographs as “powerful images of significance, humanity and loss” and Teju Cole said her approach was “unusually lyrical” in the New Yorker. BuzzFeed included her on their list of "12 Kick-ass Women Photojournalists to Follow on Instagram," and she's been included on similar lists by Mashable and Huffington Post.

Glennas Website

Stephen Ferry

Stephen Ferry is an award - winning photojournalist with decades of experience photographing mining in Latin America. His first book I Am Rich Potosí (Monacellii Press, 1999) documented the historic silver mines of Potosí, Bolivia. His second, Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict (Umbrage, 2012) received widespread recognition as a groundbreaking photo book.

Stephens Website

Elizabeth Emma Ferry

Elizabeth Emma Ferry is a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University who has dedicated her career to the study of mining in Mexico, the U.S.,and Colombia. Her two books, Not Ours Alone (Columbia U. Press, 2005), and Minerals, Collecting and Value across the US-Mexican Border (Indiana U. Press, 2013) closely study labor relations and value creation in mining.

Elizabeth on Brandeis University